there's something called the fundamental law of traffic congestion that establishes that vehicle miles traveled increase roughly one for one with highway miles built. if you build it, they will drive, okay? the only way to make sure that our city streets are moved sufficiently is to charge people for it, to actually do what singapore does, second densest country in the world, and yet you can drive around it effortlylessly because they have that electronic road pricing thing that charges you for using these streets. america's cities are running, essentially, a soviet-style urban transit policy. they used to have grocery stores that would give away eggs and butter at far below market prices, the result was you couldn't get the goods. that's what we do with our city streets. they're a valuable commodity, and as a result, they're the urban equivalent of long lines which are traffic jams. there's no path other than actually making people pay for the cost of their actions. now, we already, of course, pay plenty, and one of the enduring challenges of cities is how to make them affordable. i k